Posts Tagged → instruction

It Kahn Be Done Better

It seems everyone is wild about Khan Academy, offering it up as an example of how to revolutionize education, especially Bill Gates who has contributed a small part of his money to the project.

However, a post that recently popped up in my Delicious network (thanks, Scott), discusses two issues about Salman Khan and his video collection that also bother me.

But what I found was that Khan was just an OK teacher. His examples are not well planned. His pacing is inconsistent. I’d say that at least half the math teachers in this country could do at least as good a job as Khan does. What is ironic about Bill Gates admiration of Khan is that Gates is investing so much energy right now into identifying what makes a great teacher to create better teacher evaluations. Yet the person he considers the best teacher is merely adequate.

Which, of course, also points up the fallacy of allowing someone with a high profile, lots of money, and little understanding of the teaching process to drive education reform.

So, what about that part saying that many teachers could to do a better job than Khan? Maybe instead of funding a collection of canned lessons from one person, this might be the better way for Bill to spend his money.

What we need is a platform where teachers can upload their videos and the ones that are the best can be featured and those teachers can achieve some Khan-like fame. Instead Khan has a monopoly as the one man show.

I’d go even farther and open the platform to students. There are also many kids who could create better instructional materials than Khan, and they often come with better insight than most adults about what it takes to explain complicated topics to their peers.

However, there is one more major reason why the Khan Academy is bad for instruction, especially math, the topic around which his fame was built.

Rote tutorials like this reinforce the concept that math is all about mastering the process, about learning to take select the correct algorithm, plug in a few numbers, and crank through a solution, the one and only correct answer.

Math in the real world is far more interesting, interconnecting not only with science but the social sciences, business, and many other disciplines. We do our students a great disservice by making them think the largely boring work we do in school is “real” math.

Not What It Says on the Door

According to the title of the office in which I work here in the overly-large school district, we do instructional technology integration.  Which is good, something I really want to do.

Except that much of what we actually do has nothing with either “instructional technology” or instruction.

The major project that involves the most people and time in our office is an “assessment resource tool”, basically a large database of questions that teachers use to create tests for their students.

But none of that is “instructional” technology.

We also have a parallel database that is being loaded with “curriculum and resources for planning and delivering instruction”, allowing teachers to search for and download activities and lessons create under the auspices of our curriculum specialists. It’s the kind of stuff that used to be packaged in large binders (or in more recent years on CD) and shipped to schools.

And that’s still not instructional technology.

We are also involved with the multi-year rollout of a new student information system, another big database which will include an online gradebook, attendance records, and other information teachers need.

Not instructional technology.

Online standardized tests? Data analysis? IWBs? Student response systems (aka clickers)?

No. Nope. Normally not. Hell no.

So what is my definition of instructional technology?

Simple. It’s anything that students use to develop and enhance their learning.  Or, in the words of our school board, students should “use technology to access, communicate, and apply knowledge and to foster creativity”.

Whatever the specific language, the key point here is that to be instructional, all this technology we’ve spent tens of millions on over the past decade – the hardware, software, networks – should be in the hands of, and to some degree controlled by, the kids to build their knowledge and experience.

Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening around here, certainly not this time of year when every resource (including technology) for almost every student in almost every school is completely focused on getting the right bubbles in the right places.

And it’s not just the six to eight weeks around the SOLs (gotta practice, remember). All of that stuff above, especially that “assessment resource tool”, is sucking up all of the available computing devices in many schools during most of the year.

Which means students have fewer and fewer tools for all that creating, communicating, and collaborating we say we want the kids to be doing.

However, I’m not saying those resources that are the primary focus of our office aren’t important.* Teachers and schools certainly need good administrative tools to better manage the increasingly complicated learning process.

Just don’t call any of it “instructional” unless it’s in the hands of kids.

*I would argue that clickers and IWBs, however you classify them, are a waste of money… but that’s another post.